Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual

Chapter 26. Server-Side XML and XSLT

XML is everywhere. You’ll find it used in countless files on your computer; for everything from tracking information in your iTunes music library to providing the structure and options in Dreamweaver’s menus. On the Web, XML is used to broadcast newsfeeds, and provide product, pricing, and availability information from Amazon.com and eBay using a technology known as Web Services.

So what exactly is XML? XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a tag-based language, somewhat like HTML, used to organize data in a clear, easy to understand way so that different computers, operating systems, and programs can quickly and easily exchange data.

Dreamweaver CS3’s Spry XML Data Set tools (covered in Chapter 12) let you work with XML on the “client-side.” Translation: someone visiting your site downloads a Web page, some Spry JavaScript programming, and an XML file; then, thanks to some fancy JavaScript magic, the Web page can display and interact with the XML data in a variety of ways. For example, you can publish a table of data that the visitor can sort dynamically, simply by clicking a particular column’s header (see Spry Table for more about this trick).

Note

For a detailed introduction to XML, go to What Is XML?.

The tradeoff with the client-side approach is that it forces a visitor’s Web browser to download the entire XML file. If the file is large, that can take a fair amount of time, since the browser downloads the whole enchilada (even the stuff you ...